Related papers: Where are the First Stars now?
The oldest stars in the Milky Way (born in the first few billion years) are expected to have a high density in the inner few kpc, spatially overlapping with the Galactic bulge. We use spectroscopic data from the Pristine Inner Galaxy Survey…
Some of the most massive globular clusters of our Milky Way, such as for example omega-Centauri, show a mixture of stellar populations spanning a few Gyr in age and 1.5 dex in metallicities. In contrast, standard formation scenarios predict…
The far infrared background is a sink for the hidden aspects of galaxy formation. At optical wavelengths, ellipticals and spheroids are old, even at $z \sim 1.$ Neither the luminous formation phase nor their early evolution is seen in the…
Newborn stars form within the localized, high density regions of molecular clouds. The sequence and rate at which stars form in dense clumps and the dependence on local and global environments are key factors in developing descriptions of…
The formation of the first galaxies at redshifts z~10-15 signaled the transition from the simple initial state of the universe to one of ever increasing complexity. We here review recent progress in understanding their assembly process with…
The process that leads to the formation and early evolution of low-mass stars is in a broad sense well understood theoretically and carefully traced observationally. The largest uncertainties in this framework reside in the poorly known…
The aim of this paper is to set constraints of the epochs of early-type galaxy formation through the 'archaeology' of the stellar populations in local galaxies. Using our models of absorption line indices that account for variable abundance…
We investigate the hierarchical build-up of stars in bulges within the standard $\Lambda$-cold dark matter scenario. By separating the population into stars born during starbursts that accompany the formation of spheroids in major mergers…
The earliest stars to form in the Universe were the first sources of light, heat and metals after the Big Bang. The products of their evolution will have had a profound impact on subsequent generations of stars. Recent studies of primordial…
Super Star Clusters are one of the most extreme star forming environments in the universe, and the most massive and dense of these may be proto globular clusters. Like individual massive stars, the earliest stages of super star cluster…
We determined the age of the stellar content of the Galactic halo by considering main-sequence turn-off stars. From the large number of halo stars provided by Sloan Digital Sky Survey, we could accurately detect the turn-off as a function…
I review observational studies of the large-scale star formation process in nearby galaxies. A wealth of new multi-wavelength data provide an unprecedented view on the interplay of the interstellar medium and (young) stellar populations on…
The early chemical evolution of the Galaxy and the Universe is vital to our understanding of a host of astrophysical phenomena. Since the most metal-poor Galactic stars (with metallicities down to [Fe/H]\sim-5.5) are relics from the…
The currently available empirical evidence on the star formation processes in the extreme, high-pressure environments induced by galaxy encounters, mostly based on high-resolution Hubble Space Telescope imaging observations, strongly…
The first stars in the Universe are predicted to have been much more massive than the Sun. Gravitational condensation accompanied by cooling of the primordial gas due to molecular hydrogen, yields a minimum fragmentation scale of a few…
We investigate the formation and morphological evolution of the first galaxies in the cosmic morning ($10 \gtrsim z \gtrsim 4$) using the Horizon Run 5 (HR5) simulation. For galaxies above the stellar mass $M_{\star, {\rm min}} = 2\times…
There are at least three reasons for being interested in galaxies at high redshifts that formed most of their stars quite quickly early in the history of the Universe: (1) the ages of their stellar populations can potentially place…
In the $\Lambda$CDM model of structure formation, a stellar spheroid grows by the assembly of smaller galaxies, the so-called building blocks. Combining the Munich-Groningen semi-analytical model of galaxy formation with the high resolution…
According to the current understanding of cosmic structure formation, the precursors of the most massive structures in the Universe began to form shortly after the Big Bang, in regions corresponding to the largest fluctuations in the cosmic…
The Galactic bulge is the central spheroid of our Galaxy, containing about one quarter of the total stellar mass of the Milky Way (M_bulge=1.8x10^10 M_sun; Sofue, Honma & Omodaka 2009). Being older than the disk, it is the first massive…